Category: Compassion

Traditional law practice overlooks unique opportunities for clients to truly improve their lives and the lives of those around them. The narrow focus of traditional law practice fixates on objective facts to the virtual exclusion of ways in which the parties, and others impacted by conflict, relate to those facts. The ways in which we relate to our unfolding life experience are largely a function of learned conditioning – the result of accumulated past experience – together with genetic predispositions.

Typically, when a client comes to an attorney for advice, they do so because of some real or perceived loss or threat of loss in their life. This loss may be economic, physical, or ego-related such as feared loss of community standing or identity. The reality is that an objective fact or set of facts have arisen in the world of which the client has some awareness. What will widely differ among individuals is the layer or multitude of layers of meaning that he or she will (usually unconsciously) impose on these factual events or scenarios. These predispositions, to the extent they remain unconscious, largely dictate the ways in which we relate to life experience.

Because legal conflict so often gives rise to these layers of unconscious relation to experience, it presents an ideal opportunity to explore a client’s conditioning and habitual ways of relating to experience. The failure to explore these tendencies at particularly challenging times is likely to result in these tendencies becoming increasingly solidified in the client’s life. Because traditional law practice largely ignores these underlying dynamics, clients far more often than not look back on their “legal problems” with disdain, representing just one in a long series of frustrations resulting from their habitual relation to experience in more or less unconscious ways.

Holistic law practice stresses the transformative potential in conflict. The holistic lawyer acknowledges and explores with the client his or her ways of relating to past and present experience that may have brought about or exacerbated the “legal problem.” Often, when these previously unconscious orientations are explored, clients become able to let go of these tendencies and see more clearly the nature of what has happened and what is happening, and deal with it in a far more compassionate and less reactive manner. More importantly, the client comes to realize that his or her future behavior need not be dictated by conditioned thinking and habitual reactions.

To learn more about holistic law practice, contact Holistic Lawyer Michael Lubofsky by calling (415) 508-6263 or by visiting http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com.

To a significant degree, our counterproductive reactions to most situations involving conflict are a function of the extent to which we cling to inaccurate views of the nature of life. A primary Buddhist teaching relates to the truth of suffering and the inherent unsatisfactoriness of existence. This “unsatisfactoriness” is often manifested in the impermanence, pain and perpetual incompleteness intrinsic to all forms of life.

In modern American society, most of us have lived with decades of pervasive conditioning that life should provide us with lasting “happiness.” In order to successfully promote goods, services, ideas, etc., the idea of happiness continued in these messages promises some perpetual state of bliss devoid of pain and suffering.

Problems begin to surface when we come to internalize this notion of “happiness” to a point at which we unconsciously accept these messages as truth. Once this misguided idea of the nature of reality has been adopted, we are well positioned for highly charged reactions to life situations that do not square with these internalized ideals.

Almost invariably, situations arise that are painful. These situations involve loss in the form of relationships, material acquisitions, physical health, and eventually life itself. One’s refusal to accept these realities of existence will eventually cause one to react to conflict either by simply denying reality inherent in the situation, or by pushing back in a futile effort to manipulate reality so as to make these situations “go away.”

This type of reactionary behavior and denial can be extremely unhelpful and damaging when facing legal conflict. Defensive reactions aimed at preserving egoic ideals of how life “should be” can effectively sever one from an ability to open up to a wider, more holistic view of the situation at hand. Viewing the situation from such a constrained vantage point will usually preclude identification of optimal solutions to conflict.

The integration of mindfulness with law practice offers the potential of moving beyond one’s conditioning that life should not include suffering. In so doing, people involved in legal conflict may become far better able to identify and implement optimal solutions that can serve to fundamentally improve their lives long after concrete legal issues have been resolved.

To learn more about the transformational potential of holistic law practice, contact Attorney Michael Lubofsky at (415) 508-6263, or visit his holistic law and mediation website at http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com.

An increasing number of studies point towards the integral role that compassion and empathy for others plays in cultivating happiness and well-being. Compassion arises from a felt connection to all of life in the present moment. Compassion lies beyond thoughts and preconceived notions about a person or a given situation.

The typical adversarial approach to conflict resolution that pervades contemporary civil justice in America is rarely effective in cultivating compassion and/or empathy. Instead, one’s thought-driven notions of how things should be most often form the basis of an attorney’s litigation strategy.

Such a failure to elicit compassion and empathy can explain why, far more often than not, legal or “courtroom” victories ring hollow for a prevailing party soon after a fleeting sense of ego gratification dissipates.

In contrast to this prevailing adversarial model, holistic law practice has as a primary objective the cultivation of compassion and empathy prior to the development and implementation of a concrete legal strategy. A fundamental precept inherent in the holistic approach is that optimal, lasting solutions to interpersonal conflict arise from beyond ego, thought, and preconceived notions.

To learn more about holistic law practice, contact Holistic LawyerMichael Lubofsky at (4-5) 508-6263, or visit http://www.mindfulaw.com.